Deforestation: Fresh concerns over rapid loss of forests

Many Nigerians depend on agriculture as their primary means of living. The consequent growth of farmlands, logging activities, rising poverty, overuse of fuel wood, medicinal resources, and urban development have caused a considerable decrease in forest areas. CHINEDUM UWAEGBULAM reports that the government’s failure to adequately safeguard the forests worsens the issue, a development attributable to corruption and ineffective law enforcement.

Nigeria is facing its worst rate of deforestation in decades, following bandits’ illegal occupation of forests, high demand for wood as building materials, expansion of infrastructural activities, and increasing prices of cooking gas in the country.

This surge in deforestation has also been linked to infrastructure development, which is often done without appropriate Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), like the construction of the ongoing Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway.

While the Federal Government maintains that the project will improve transport links and stimulate economic development across the densely populated region,a lecturer in the Department of Geography, at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Niger State, Peace Nwaerema, was quoted as saying: “The construction and increased traffic can result in habitat destruction, ecosystem fragmentation, and pollution, particularly affecting coastal and marine biodiversity. The highway’s proximity to sensitive areas, such as wetlands and mangroves, raises concern about soil erosion, increased runoff, and the disruption of migratory patterns for local wildlife.”

The 700-kilometres of new coastal highway will run from Lagos to Calabar, in Cross River State. En route to Calabar, the project will pass near, or through several protected areas that are refuges for several endangered species including chimpanzees. In Bayelsa State specifically, the highway will cut through several coastal barrier island forests and pass close to the Edumanom Forest Reserve, a 93 km2 (36 mi2) area of freshwater swamp forests and creeks, an environment-focused online site reported.

Earlier in 2022, Nwaerema published research into the environmental impact of the East-West Road built across the Niger Delta in 2006, concluding that the road construction and traffic damaged aquatic ecosystems, fisheries, air quality, surface water, groundwater, and soil. “Forests were opened, altering ecosystems, while wildlife faced regular exposure to hunting and roadkill.”

Another development that wiped away, swathes of forest resources in a reckless fashion is the controversial superhighway initiated but not delivered by the immediate past government of Cross River State, which was led by Prof. Ben Ayade. The destruction of priceless forest reserves in the name of the commencement of work, but without EIA still remains a mindboggling development.

The state is home to the largest remaining rainforests in Nigeria, which is also one of the largest bio-diversity forests in the world. Importantly, it also plays host to highly threatened species, including the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee, drill monkeys, Cross River gorilla, and over 1, 500 plant species 77 of them endangered medicinal plants and others.

The so-called superhighway, six-lane wide and 260km long, was planned to lead from a yet-to-be-built Bakassi Deep Sea Port in the New Bakassi Local Council all the way to Benue State passing through Akamkpa and Ikom local councils, and cutting through several protected forests reserves in the state.

The super highway was expected to have a 10km right-of-way on both sides. That implies that a total of 20km-wide land corridor along the superhighway route falls under the land revoked by the state government, with the larger implication being that over 185 communities within the affected corridor risked displacement and sudden loss of access to their land.

One of the at-risk communities, the Ekuri Community people of Cross River protested against the state government’s revocation of their communal land rights to construct the $3.5 billion super highway.

The people who are residents of Akamkpa and Obubra local councils during the protest said the highway would obliterate 33,600 hectares of Ekuri forests.
They also alleged that the revocation of the right of occupancy of their ancestral land for 10-kilometre on either side of the six-lane 260-kilometre highway would destroy the livelihood of the forest-dependent communities.

Apart from other factors including land uptake for urbanisation, industrial agriculture, monocultures, unchecked grazing, illegal logging, and felling of trees for firewood that are accelerating deforestation, climate change is equally a strong factor and contributes through desertification, sea level rise, and coastal erosion, as well as illegal mining in protected forests such as the Cross River National Park.

The worst hit are six states, namely Edo, Taraba, Cross River, Ondo, Ogun, and Kwara States. The states lost a total of 868 thousand hectares (Kha) of forest cover in 22 years, from 2001 to 2023. Edo had the most tree cover loss at 321 kha, Taraba (143 kha), Cross River (134 kha), Ondo (130 kha), Ogun(104 kha), and Kwara (36.7 kha).

According to the Global Forest Watch, Nigeria lost 1.33 million hectares (Mha) of tree cover, equivalent to a 13 per cent decrease in tree cover since 2000, and 724 Mt of CO₂ emissions, while 9.3per cent of tree cover loss occurred in areas where the dominant drivers of loss resulted in deforestation.
Also, the data further shows that in 2010, Nigeria had 10.6 mha of natural forests, extending over 12 per cent of its land area. In 2023, it lost 81.2kha of natural forest, equivalent to 54.6 mt of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

From 2000 to 2020, Nigeria gained 928 kha of tree cover equal to 0.71per cent of the global total, which occurred outside of plantations. A report by the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) shows that the decline rate of forest cover in Nigeria ranged from 3.5 per cent to 3.7 per cent yearly over the period 2000 to 2010.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) rates Nigeria as having the world’s highest deforestation rate of primary forests, losing more than half of its primary forest in the last five years. It further stated that between 2000 and 2005, Nigeria lost 55.7 per cent of its primary forests, while in 2020, the country lost 97.8 kilo hectares of natural forest.

In most of the remaining forests, loggers are having a field day, with the noise of roaring chainsaws and countless timber-laden trucks pointing to the fact that the authorities may have lost administrative control of the reserves.

The Guardian gathered that in the last four weeks in Nigeria, 29,001 deforestation alerts were detected, which affected an area of approximately 355 ha. There were 21,036 deforestation alerts reported in Nigeria between October 14, 2024, and October 21 2024, covering a total of 257 ha of which 0.16 per cent were high confidence alerts detected by a single system and none were alerts detected by multiple systems.

An environmental activist and Director, the Health of Mother Earth Foundation, (HOMEF), Nnimmo Bassey, said although forests are being lost across all ecological zones in Nigeria, Cross River State is in the clear lead.

Bassey explained that the proposed superhighway could not overcome stringent environmental impact assessment requirements of the Federal Ministry of Environment, another indicator that the appetite for the decimation of whatever is left of the pristine forest of Cross River State has not abated.

“With the new highway being proposed by the Federal Ministry of Works, from Lagos to Calabar, there is a probability that the proponents may ride roughshod over environmental impact concerns and thereby sound the death knell for the forests,” Bassey said.

According to him, highly pronounced deforestation occurs in the coastal states as mangrove and rain forests are being lost to oil pollution, canalisation, and fragmentation for so-called pipelines rights of way, flow stations, and waste pits by oil companies and other related industries.

Deforestation is also prominent in other zones where exotic species are being felled for export.He stated that states appear to turn a blind eye to deforestation due to an insufficient number of professional foresters and monitoring capacities. The inability to engage forest-dependent communities and the search for internally generated revenue are other contributing factors.

Bassey urged governments to fully integrate community initiatives in forest management and empower them to protect and manage forests. “These communities have cultural links to their forests, deep knowledge of the forest ecosystems, as well as, capacities to extract economic values from non-timber forest products

He said it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that forests are devoid of illegal activities such as mining and banditry. “Government must ensure that infrastructural developments, no matter how urgent, obey basic rules, including the requirements of environmental and social impact assessments. A neglect of the basic laws sends the message that illegal activities are permissible and opens the floodgates for deviant behaviours. The fact that forests are complex ecosystems with multiple benefits should propel a halt to the expansion of plantations and unchecked urbanisation into forests,” he added.

For a Professor of Plant Ecology, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, Emmanuel Nzegbule, factors responsible for continued deforestation in Nigeria are extensive agriculture to increase production; growing urbanisation, increasing poverty, over-exploitation for fuel wood and medicine.

Nzegbule, who was the former Executive Director, the Nigerian Environmental Study Action Team (NEST), said states are failing to control deforestation because of the need to generate revenue; lack of forest guards to protect the forests, and weak policies to enforce deforestation.
He called for community participation in forest management to check deforestation as they are the custodians of the forests, adding that their involvement in profit sharing will help in the sustenance of the forests.

Nzegbule also suggested the establishment of more forest reserves, employment of more forest guards, review of forest policies, and establishment of forestry commissions.

A former Director-General the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF), Dr Muhtari Aminu-Kano, called for the planting of more trees to recover lost ground. He said the NCF was exploring ways of gaining back some of what has been lost through the green recovery initiative’ that will bring stakeholders like the government, faith leaders, traditional rulers, and others to plant trees.

“We have only four per cent of original forest cover now and we think that is catastrophic and requires massive efforts to increase that coverage to at least 25 per cent across the country in 30 years,” he added.